Looking for a disto that will be fast and where all I need will work on a Lenovo B50-45 laptop.
Which is: Fn keys, at least the backlight keys. Bluetooth audio. USB 4g modem (Huawei E392u) must work.
Must not be too slow. Even with an SSD upgrade this laptop is on the slow side for my taste with MATE and even Xfce. It was unusable with Win8 - so I got it very cheap.

Tried the Live session of LXDE and default old kernel.

Good impression. Quite fast even from an old usb 2.0 stick. Bluetooth audio works out of the box. The Fn keys I need work plus one or two others. Volume control does not work possibly not flight mode but who really cares. 4G connection with the modem worked point blank with wvdial. It did not show in nm-applet but this is unfortunately normal now, they have messed it up.

This is better than other Jessie based distros, at least running LXDE.

Proprietary video driver is no point on this, it can only run old DOS games and things like Halflife which run fine on free drivers. Disk space is limited, cheap 120 gb SSD. Actually performance was much worse when I tried Catalyst. But it works very well for internet/work with free driver.

Rough spots, sure: windows came up without window buttons. Had to log out, log into Openbox and back to LXDE to fix it.

Going ahead with install. Mint Xfce does not cut it, for some weird reason the usb modem will not work with either nm-applet or wvdial. Also it is noticeably slower than a Debian-based.

Felis

Titel:Verfasst am: 15.02.2018, 11:40 Uhr

Anmeldung: 18. Okt 2007
Beiträge: 417

Last 2 years I ran Kanotix jessie with TDE on my Lenovo B50-45 with 8GB RAM. Everything worked fine and fast enough for me. Now I installed Steelfire and give Plasma a try, which I am glad I did. Beautiful look, by far fast enough and more or less "everything" works fine, including most Fn-keys (backlight, sound, ...). By the way I made a BIOS-update. Only thing I changed: installed wicd and removed network-manager. Asked every time for pw. That´s boring.